French Bill Gates Says Giving is the Way of the Future

Twenty years ago as an enthusiastic entrepreneur, Alexandre Mars, confidently predicted the success of the Internet and the mobile telephone. Today, as a middle-aged philanthropist (having profited himself from his predictions), he is forecasting that corporate giving is the next big thing.

Mars spoke to the AAPA on Friday May 18 at a breakfast gathering at Strategies & Corp in Paris.

He now spends most of his time and all of his profits on the Epic Foundation, the non-profit he started to scale up a portfolio of international NGOs in countries such as Africa and India in such areas as healthcare, preventing violence against women, and preserving the environment. No one escapes his reach – individuals, families, companies, corporations – when it comes to raising money for Epic…

“Giving has to be easy and painless,” Mars says. “You can do something as small as donating the odd-cents on your pay stub every week to pledging shares of your company.”

He’s convinced that investors, employees and the general public will be looking at more than corporate financial pictures when making choices in the future. Corporate social activities will count, too. “People want to know how a company is engaged, he says. And for employees, it’s not about whether you have an office with a view. It’s what you and the company you work for are doing for the world.”